Silver Lining Redux: An Ambitious, Audacious Take on Martial Law
Purists and activists aren't exactly its intended audience.
(SPOT.ph) Silver Lining Redux is one of the most audacious theater productions of 2024. What’s more interesting is the show doesn’t even seem to be aware that it is—which only adds to its charm.
It’s audacious in that it goes against the grain of works of art, whether in literature, film, or stage, that deal with Martial Law. Instead of dark, heavy, and grim, it’s mostly bright, light, and—are you ready for it?—feel-good. Not that it whitewashes the horrors of authoritarian rule; it’s just that its narrative is pointedly bourgeois.
What Silver Lining Redux is all about
A reworking of the original material staged last year, this musical tells the story of a barkada of four well-off boomers putting together a play for their homecoming, in honor of a dearly departed friend and mentor from college days. The project sends them reminiscing, but of course—how they came from exclusive high schools and ended up in UP, and how they enlisted then in a militant student organization advocating for human rights. For the boys, truth be told, it was mainly to get close to the girls. In fact, one of them, Leo (played alternately by acting veterans Charlie Davao and Jamie Wilson), even courted one of them, the all-girls-school-bred Julia, since senior high.
The boys soon discover the rambols they engaged in during their younger days were but child’s play compared to the First Quarter Storm crackdowns on university activists. The wave of protests during this period leads to the disappearance of students including three from the org, Julia among them.
Five decades later, the mystery of Julia’s disappearance remains unresolved and the group continues to grapple with the hows and whys. This gives rise to a conflict between Leo and Raul while developing the play: do they include Julia in the story? It also puts a strain on the working relationship between the boomers, and their children who are helping put the show together. The younger generation — now activists themselves fighting for the West Philippine Sea, joining the Pink Movement, fighting against historical revisionism and extra-judicial killings — starts struggling with the restrictions on their artistic and creative freedom as well as their elders’ inability to be fully truthful with them about the past.
Seamless storytelling
Silver Lining Redux grows more and more ambitious as the play progresses, and as it flits from past to present to tackle the themes of revisionism, activism and complacency, generational differences, trauma and guilt. It’s no minor achievement that it pretty much succeeds at achieving a seamlessness in its storytelling, and doing so with a consistent and confident light touch, nimble feet, and sprightly spirit. The heavy themes go down quite easily and the play maintains a steady stance despite the weight of all that it has on its head.
There’s something refreshing about the show’s courage to tell the ML story the way it does, middle class sentiments, mirrorball and all. Who’s to say there’s only one perspective that counts, that the stories of the privileged are not worth a listen, that a theater piece about martial law can’t be bloodless, or bright like, well, silver?
Purists and activists are clearly not this play’s intended audience. By wrapping the issue of martial law in such a broad, accessible, crowd-pleasing package, Silver Lining Redux may yet succeed in shining even a sliver of light on the topic of military rule among today’s bourgeoisie, especially the younger generations who know little to nothing about it. If they go and see it.
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Silver Lining Redux concludes its very limited two-week run this weekend at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium in RCBC Plaza, Makati. Tickets available at https://ticket2me.net/event/21933.